


The Impossible Future

by mewlk



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Dark Doctor (Doctor Who), F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-18
Updated: 2016-05-18
Packaged: 2018-06-09 06:49:55
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,699
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6894439
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mewlk/pseuds/mewlk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She was his Impossible girl to offer him an Impossible future. The Doctor duels with his ego and humanity for a chance at redemption, but it comes at a price. Twelfth Doctor/Clara. Minor Eleventh Doctor/Clara. Slight OOC. Mature.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Periphery

**Chapter 1: Periphery**

What an Impossible girl. He’s brooding from behind Amy’s tortoiseshell readers, but Clara can’t detect his brooding - no one can. He’s looking from the periphery of his upper periphery, and he is spinning her and the mystery about her all every which way in the console of his mind. Only to find that she is an impossible girl, not Time Lord eternal, but eternal as long as the history of his time stream.

Now in the relative safety of his own mind, the Doctor is circulating a memory projection of Clara Oswin Oswald, taking in every detail. Every curl and dimple and eager dilation of her pupils as he circles her. A projection created from a million memories of one tiny woman; he sees her human eagerness, her intimate proximity. Her scent lingers in hallways of artificial circulation in the Tardis, cycles into his insides, and he knows. 

His affinity towards humankind knows, and yet, he stores it away in cages of his mind. The guilt becomes a guard to lock away his third heart. The Doctor is older than most things, and so he knows the folly of companionship in the Tardis. Friends with their fickle bodies and short time spans - they all end, vulnerable to the order of time.

And so, Clara, in her relative timelessness, a shadow in his life’s every corner, is an impossible anomaly. Humans never stay with the Doctor for too long; their fleeting imprint is what made them absolutely… precious. He reaches over to touch Clara’s projection by the temples; he knows that the skin there is soft, softer than any other part of her. So Clara to be so open for the taking. He turns her around to whisper in her ear, his hands around the base of her neck. The Doctor can feel her pulse beneath his fingers. Really - how can humans live with just one heart?

“What. Are. You.”

Unexpectedly, his dream Clara reaches up to touch his own temples, dragging her fingers down his face. The involuntary shiver makes him feel young and old and very human. This is why he locks up the monsters he can’t control in the cages of his mind.

She turns around and tiptoes to reach his face. Dream Clara eyes his mouth and then back up to his eyes.

“I was born for you. To die and suffer so that you will never have to.” The egomaniacal side of the Doctor pushes her against the wall of his mind; his arms caging her.

“No more, Clara.” He found himself holding her face in his surgical hands. His thumb traces a rough path down her pink flirty mouth. Her tongue reaches out to lick the pad of his thumb, and the Doctor plunges to claim her mouth. He never allows his darker Time Lord to come out in fear of scaring his companions; they were so delicate and skeptical of all things foreign and the dark corners natural to space. He’s trying to punish her, scare her away, prove to her that humanity made him forget the laws of survival and war and order.

He roughly makes his way up her impossibly tiny skirt, and he finds her wet and warm and so tight. Always, she always is. He hoists her up and wraps her legs around his waist, and the Doctor enters her as he’s done in so many depraved and countless ways in his mind. Today, he is punishing with his thrusts, and she’s mewling, moaning his real name over and over again. Every time his name passes her lips, the thrusts become faster, hotter, deeper.

He bends down to lick the side of her neck up to her ear, breathlessly moans, “What.” Thrust. 

“Are.” Moan. 

“You.” His name.

Her skin is this perfect shade of pink, and he wants to mark her everywhere only to fix her up again.

She looks up with eyes too earnest for a projection. Clara peaks; her honey-coated pussy milking him for all he’s worth. She says, “Yours. All I am is yours.” His third heart throbs in his chest, and he finds his skin glowing gold. In a panic, a madness, a rage, a heartbeat, he turns his perfect, too-perfect Clara around and rides her without pace. She’s clinging on because she’s human and he’s on his own rhythm, unmatched.

He doesn’t want to see her or have her see him. The Doctor wraps her unruly lovely curls around his hand to pull her against his chest and growls, “No, Clara. No more.” He is done with her and she takes her beautiful naked projection and walks back into the cage. His hand reaches out to touch the wall that braced her. She is Impossible, but in his mind, she at least adheres to his rules and order, and there’s no complications when it comes to his … whims. There’s no human chaos to fracture time and reality.

There’s just restraint. He looks up, and his hand is raw and cut from clenching his fist.

“Doctor, Doctor.” He had thought that he put that projection to rest. The sound of her voice was coming from outside his mind. The Doctor closed the periphery of his periphery and woke up to Clara sharing a seat next to his in the console room of the Tardis.

She was impossibly close; her eyebrows drawn together in worry. The heat of her body pressing against the furnace of his skin. Her hand is reaching out to touch his temples, and he grabs her fingers before she can even touch skin. He might not be accountable for his actions, for his loss of humanity.

“Oh dear Clara, chairs are meant to sit one. Otherwise, they would be called sofas.” Ah yes, order, the humor restores the distance between them.

“I was just worried, Doctor. You looked like you were sweating up and moaning something awful.”

“God, the educators of Earth need a lesson in basic Time Lord biology.” At the implications, Clara swallowed, and he watched her elegant neck bob in anticipation. Her scent began to waft, and his hand twitched and then clenched. He branded a goofy smile and then lifted off to the exit. “Just my time of the month, is all.”

He jumped away, but not before turning around to watch her impossible face turn downcast. The scent of her arousal greyed out by sadness. His own eyes gave away too much: he had evaded her affection, an extension of her heart, and it’s hard to say why at that moment he found his order a bit flawed. Always, it had been to protect humans from their own indulgent follies, their fantasies of what they meant to the Doctor, never completely requited. Always, it had been to avoid more blood and tears on his hands.

So, why, as he watched Clara Oswin Oswald stare at her hands in a dim console room, did he find that order a bit flawed? Clenching his jaw to prevent words from spilling out, he walked deeper into the hallways of his Tardis to find a room and lock away the Valeyard, the Incoming Storm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> After a 12 year hiatus, I am fueled by the Fanfiction gods to return and write something dark, moody and a little naughty. Doctor Who doesn’t belong to anyone but the rich proprietors at the BBC. As usual, feedback is gold.


	2. Valeyard

**Chapter 2: Valeyard**

It was known - Time Lords never forget the first face they saw. His first was hers. His eyes didn’t take her in as a whole; he saw her lips first - slightly ajar, pink, wet. Ah yes, the younger version of himself - that chinned idiot - was quite fascinated by them. Quite the adolescent he was, couldn’t control himself, couldn’t … settle his thoughts. That bonny nose of hers was next, then her hair, but it’s her eyes that seared something permanent in the Twelfth Doctor.

Her eyes were seeing him as if he was responsible for killing that floppy haired jester. As if he was the stranger. As if she was looking at him and not seeing him. All things that suited the new Doctor just fine. The Regeneration gave him what the previous Doctor was surely lacking: control, a little less humanity, clarity.

Hours after the Regeneration, he sat in his chair by the fireplace in his private bedroom. His fingers were absentmindedly tracing the carving of his people’s history on the chair arms. The particular scene on the wood was a Time Lord’s regeneration cycle; his fingertips felt the grief, the loss, the chaos, the rebirth, the forgetting. He recalled the first few days of his Regeneration in Victorian London, the loneliness of newness. Her eyes that didn’t see him. That ridiculous fool calling her over the phone to request mercy and charity in the new Doctor’s time of need, for her to be there for him in his time of need. In the last hour of his death, he hazily remembered when he succumbed to a moment of weakness, called Clara of the future and asked her to remember.

To remember that all these versions of him were the same.

Which in fact was a big, fat lie. Each regeneration did not pass on the same essence of a man. 

It was more like an inheritance of a catalog of memories, like a son inheriting his dead father’s possessions. He was not the Eleventh Doctor, as much as it gave Clara Oswald some peace of mind. He was not the weak fool that played Peter Pan across the universe. He did not possess the same inclinations, same obsessions with paradoxes. The Twelfth Doctor was more than human urges, which is why left her stranded in Glasgow to “fetch coffee” for a few weeks.

Clara Oswald’s gravitational pull on the Doctor was not what it was. The Eleventh Doctor needed her as his Companion as some sort of tether to his humanity. He was afraid of the Time Lord that he would become without her, so he built these maddening glass houses in his mind.

So weak, that boy. These glass houses were filled with the most distracting things. At the moment, he was navigating the vast hallways of his Time Lord mind, constructed to look like the interiors of the Time Lord academy from his childhood.

He opened a closeby door, which held his first memory of Clara in the Tardis after the phone call. 

After departing from Victorian England, they were in the Tardis, sitting in the discomfort and silence of the post-adventure, the inevitable downtime when they have to entertain each other.

He was peeking at her from across the second platform railing. They were casually browsing for books on his wall-to-wall library, some reading material for their ride home. Clara straightened her posture, turned around and gave him that false bravado that she put up to give Eleventh his bon courage through their adventures. How he wishes that she would stop trying to save him.

“Where to next?” Her dimple didn’t come out, even as she forced a smile.

“You don’t have to do that. I am not your boyfriend.” She grimaced and looked down. They knew who he was speaking about, but it’s not human practice to speak ill of the dead. Her white-capped knuckles on the bar closest to her was the only sign of her restraint. Clara was angry, white-hot, but she was trying to be cordial, out of respect for her dead boyfriend.

“To no fault of your own.” Her head shot up to look at him. Her eyes were honest at that moment. They were scanning his face for truth, sincerity. The Twelfth Doctor was callous, but he was sincere. He had nothing to prove, nothing to hide.

“Did he… ?” Her question lingered in the air.

Did he, what, Clara? Moments passed by, and timid, human Clara said nothing. He took a few long, purposeful strides to her until he was staring down at her.

“What, Clara?” His Scottish brogue wrapped around the “r’s” in her name, “Did he love you?” Another step towards her direction, and she took an apprehensive step backwards.

“Did he imagine a future life with you, stretching decades?” Step, step. Her pupils were dilated; her breathing became shallow.

“Did he love you?” Her back was against a shelf, and he was hovering over, blocking the majority of the candle light from the nearby coffee table. He looked at her with hooded eyelids and tipped his head before dipping down to her ear. 

As he spoke, his lips blew hot breath at her neck, and her body responded and opened up, heated up. She was so close in proximity, but he knew that he will never touch her, promised not to take liberties in connecting. Companions must not be a liability. They should be as expendable as a projection.

Clara looked like a pinprick of the universe, an exploding star. Was she thinking of that jester of a Doctor?

He just wanted to snuff out her light, “Or did he just want to fuck you?”

The Twelfth Doctor ran his hands through his unruly gray hair and wryly smiled at the thought. “Oh yes, he did. As you must have many times.”

He saw her right hand swing for his face, like the many times he observed the wind up of many events, all the minute details and moments of chaos that precede set points of time. The sound of skin hitting skin was louder than the pain. The noise within the Tardis often amplified by the echoes of time travel.

“You’re not him. You shame his memory and his life.” 

She turned around, so to hide her very human reaction to her vulnerability and her mourning. He leaned forward slightly, just to take in the distinct perfume of her raw emotions. It smelled like a combination of a dying log fire, salted tears and spilled spiced cider. She was emitting the scents of her long forgotten memories; this one belonged to the day after her mother’s funeral. 

He delved into her mind’s eyes and saw a twelve-year-old version of her running away from home, camped out in the forest near her house. She prepared her mother’s special wintertime cider and made camp a mile from home. She was burning all the photographs of her life before that day; Clara no longer felt like the girl in the photo. The end of innocence was burning and wafting through time.

This version of Clara. This was why that jester stayed on Earth. 

The Tardis made quick work of bringing Clara back to London, her present day. He sat down in his plush, velvet reading chair, resting his eyes and covering them with his elegant hands.

The soft click of the door indicated that Clara was no longer inside the Tardis. She left without another word. Her return hung like a question mark on a collar. Will she?

“You are right. I am not him,” he said. 

The Doctor in this memory looks over to the Doctor who was observing in, “Did you get what you needed from this trip down Memory Lane?”

The Twelfth Doctor absentmindedly walks around the projection of the Tardis’ central chamber. “Just making my initial rounds around the mind palace.”

“What do you think?” Asks the memory Doctor.

“The fop made a mess of things… with all this made-up pornography of Clara. It takes up too much room and it’s not practical.”

The room is submerged in a hazy darkness. All furniture, walls, semblance of place gone, but the voice of the memory Doctor remains.

A naked Clara projection approaches him, walking without shame or modesty towards the Twelfth Doctor.

“Admit, there is a certain pragmatism in having a disposable Clara mucking about.” Her hand extends to caress his cheek, palm it affectionately, intimately. “Especially one so … warm.”

He reaches out to tame a wild lock of hair into its place, tucked behind her ear. His fingers grazing along the curve of her sweet and fragile jaw.

“What my predecessors never learned is that connection gives way to chaos. They were constantly building bridges that broke and gave way to more isolation, more deaths.”

With that, the projection of Clara dissipates into black smoke.

He has a higher calling than navigating his predecessor’s very human emotions. His title is the Doctor, and he was back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Doctor Who doesn’t belong to anyone but the rich proprietors at the BBC. As always, feedback is gold.


End file.
